The Scotland that gave the world Adam Smith, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Rennie MacIntosh, Andrew Carnegie, Robert Burns and Sean Connery [to name a few notables] also gave the world William Paterson.
Yes. That’s correct — William Paterson, entrepreneur, financier & trader.
Born in Tinwald, Dumfriesshire in the mid-17th century, he excelled as a young man at finance and international commerce, trading extensively throughout the Americas and West Indies. His successes led him to conceive of ‘a scheme of epic proportions’—create a trade link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the narrowest land mass joining both North and South America. He proposed establishing a colony on the Isthmus of Darien [now known as Panama], and, if successful, it would avoid ships making the long, hazardous journey both ways around Cape Horn.
To that end, he established, along with the Bank of Scotland, the trading Company of Scotland, attracting investors from all walks of life. The original financing plan was to include English & Dutch investors who would also share the capital investment equally. Initially, King William III of England gave his lukewarm support for the venture; however, strong opposition from the premier English trading enterprise, the East India Company, persuaded the English and Dutch financiers to withdraw support at the eleventh hour.
Undaunted, Patterson outfitted a fleet of 5 ships, with crew, and along with 1200 supporters set sail for Darien, arriving 4 months later to a mosquito-infested swampland and hostile Spaniard neighbours. They established a colony at New Caledonia and named their settlement Fort St. Andrew. For the native Cuna Indians, the Scots
brought the following items to trade: wigs, Bibles, combs, trinkets, woolen clothes, shoes, and clay pipes. Unsurprisingly, the Cuna Indians showed little or no interest in the Scots’ offerings; they did, however, befriend the Scots, feel sorry for their collective plight, and bring gifts of fruit and fish to the travel-weary, yellow feverish colonists. Barely 8 months from arriving, the Scots decided to abandon the colony—300 out of the original 1200 set sail for home in one ship.
Meanwhile, with no inkling of that disastrous first expedition, a second fleet set sail for Darien, found the colony abandoned, deserted and overgrown. Soon the Scots found themselves quarrelling with their Spanish neighbours, resulting in Fort St. Andrew being besieged. A month later, the Scots surrendered. They were then ordered to abandon the Fort and leave, and were soon headed back home.
A third fleet of ships, crew and would-be colonisers met with the same results.
In the two years of ‘empire building’, two thousand lives were lost, and only 3 of the 16 ships returned. Most importantly, the Scots economy suffered a huge loss of their 500,000 pounds sterling capital investment. Those folks lucky enough to return home were generally regarded as a disgrace to their country; indeed, several were disowned by their families.
Fast forward to Edinburgh now.
A stone’s throw from the Royal Bank of Scotland, there stands on Calton Hill an unfinished monument to the fallen Scots in the Napoleonic wars— known as Edinburgh’s Disgrace or Scotland’s Folly. As for the Darien Scheme, there is no Monument or Plaque or Folly, just the whispers of ghosts from a ‘scheme of epic proportions’ that turned out to be an epic failure, thrice.